How to be a French Girl by Rose Cleary

Review by Claire Thomson

Over seven million posts on Instagram are tagged #frenchgirl. When she develops a dangerous infatuation with Gustave, a French client of her employer, the narrator of Rose Cleary’s debut novel trawls through these in search of the elusive je ne sais quoi the Anglophone world seems to think French women are born with. She narrows it down: matte red lips, tousled hair and immaculate skin, despite the smoking, and a performative indifference to the male gaze that always means a man can’t help but look. When Gustave rejects her advances, the bored and underpaid receptionist follows him to Paris in deluded hopes of reinvention and escape from the mundanity of her commuter lifestyle.

A trained artist, she hasn’t produced work in some time and mocks the commercially successful model people her friend creates. But as she mocks, she tries desperately to make herself into a model French girl whom anyone, including herself, could love. When she chases down a real French girl, Gustave’s teenage daughter, she is confronted with more reality than her new persona has accounted for.

Cleary has a compelling view of contemporary sexual and class politics and conspicuously avoids the trap of portraying a mentally unwell young woman’s chaos as a radical proposition. How To Be A French Girl is a funny and provocative look at how certain modes of femininity are packaged and sold, the function of art and the artist today and the extent to which we can ever really escape where we’re from.

How to be a French Girl is published by Weatherglass Books, 10th August 2023